Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson (18 January 1932 – 11 January 2007) was an American author, novelist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, psychologist, and self- described agnostic mystic. He was recognized as an Episkopos, Pope, and saint of Discordianism.

Wilson described his work as

an “attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth”.

His goal being

“to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything.”

Wilson described himself as “model-agnostic” which

“consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes…

My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory”.

Wilson claimed “not to believe anything”, since “belief is the death of intelligence”. He described this approach as “Maybe Logic.”

Among Wilson’s 35 books, and many other works, his best-known remains the cult classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) co-authored with Robert Shea. Advertised as “a fairy tale for paranoids”, the book was intended to poke fun at the conspiratorial frame of mind.

In his nonfiction and partly autobiographical Cosmic Trigger I (1977) and its two sequels, Wilson examined Freemasons, Discordianism, Sufism, the Illuminati, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, Jack Parsons, Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, Yoga, and many other esoteric or counterculture philosophies, personalities, and occurrences.